A case study on fractal simulation of forest fire spread

This paper relates to the semi-empirical model based on fire field energy b alance and the physical model based on land temperature, aiming to provide a practical way of describing fire spread. Fire spread is determined by the characteristics of combustible materials and the agency of meteorological factors and terrains. Combustible materials, such as surface area, have no featured scale, yet the process of forest fire spread contains the self-rep licating feature, both of which contribute to the self-similarity of fire s pread. Consequently, fire behavior can be described by fractal geometry. In this research, we select Wuchagou forest in Da Hinggan Mountains as the ex perimental site where a forest fire took place three years ago. The forest fire was detected on low-resolution NOAA-AVHRR images, and fire spread was simulated on high-resolution TM images as another attempt to merge informat ion. Based on remote sensing and GIS, we adopted the method of limited spre ading lumping (DLA) to describe growing phenomenon to simulate the dynamic process of fire spread and adjusting shape of the result of fire simulation by the scale rule. As a result, the simulated fire and the actual fire man ifest the self-similarity in their spreading shapes as well as the quantita tive similarity in their areas.